The case for a phased SAP HANA implementation

When Scotts Miracle-Gro was deciding on an SAP HANA implementation, it had several choices to make. One of your most important was whether to install HANA all at once, or in phases. Why did you decide on a phased SAP HANA implementation?

Srini Muddala, manager of business warehouse and intelligence, Scotts: We are pretty new to HANA. We didn't want to go with a big bang because we don't know a lot of things about the platform. So we wanted to go with a phase 1 and phase 2 approach. We wanted to see how HANA performed and what it did for us, and we wanted a backup system. So we decided to go with phase 1 and see how it performs, and we also wanted to get some estimates and look at how the new system compared to our old system.

So, phase 1, we went with all the senior executive reports so that we could show them what HANA could do, so we could get the feel of it. Once we had that, obviously phase 2 worked fine.

A phased SAP HANA implementation might add up a little bit on the cost side, but we are not using any outside SAP or bigger implementation partners. It is all internal. So the phased approach is a cost, but not to the level it would be with other vendors.

It all depends on your data. If you don't have a lot of data, there is no reason to break it up. But we had 4 terabytes. Four terabytes is big, and on top of that we had so many data models that we don't want to move, so we couldn't do it all in one shot.